What is an Apple Dad?

It seems there has to be a name for everything nowadays – things that were never previously worth commenting on now have their own terms, hashtags and associated multitude of column inches. First came the Dad Bod (a paunch on a man, essentially), then there was normcore (which honours the trend for dressing normally – seriously!) and now there is Apple Dad.

During the Apple Launch Event last week, it seemed people were more interested in the ‘fashions’ sported on stage than learning about iOS9, new iPhones and gigantic iPads. The assorted speakers seemed to have taken a lot of time to make it look like they’d not spent very much time dressing themselves. Just like the ‘cool’ teacher at school (“hey, call me Geoff”), the Apple executive ‘uniform’ seemed to consist of untucked ill-fitting plain shirts, jeans that can only have come from whatever the American version of Marks and Spencer is and shoes by Clarks. All that was missing from the running order was one of them strumming an impromtu rendition of Wonderwall on an acoustic guitar to help everyone “chill out”.

This cringe-worthy appropriation of ‘casual’ obviously isn’t an accident; there will have been planning meetings, research groups and probably some hidden iPhone app that reads users’ brains to decipher how casual they like their tech executives to look. What a world we live in.

The offensive part is that, with Digg coining the phrase Apple Dad to describe the look, it is implied that you have to abandon all sartorial hope as soon as you become a father. Now, I’m no David Beckham, but I’d like to think that I can aim a little higher than this awkward, try-hard-but-don’t-look-like-you-have-tried-hard look sported by Phil Schiller, Tim Cook and Eddy Cue amongst others.

Just like when politicians patronisingly started making a huge point of holidaying in the UK during the credit crunch, even though we all knew they could easily afford a fortnight in Torremolinos, these multimillionaires are pretending to be regular schlubs when we know that they could happily pop down to Gap to acquire a pair of jeans that actually fit them properly. The same goes for Jeremy Clarkson, Great British Bake Off star Paul Hollywood and every other celebrity who has been implicated in this new trend.

Some Apple Dads.

Still, I suppose it detracts from the fact they were attempting to flog a pencil for $99.